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  • The Globalization of Multicultural Education
  • Margaret Sutton (bio)

Introduction

The appearance of edited volumes on a topic signals the maturation of scholarly reflection upon it within the field of comparative education. Such is the case with "multicultural education."1 In common usage in the United States, multicultural education generally refers to education about different ethnic groups that comprise the U.S. population. Indeed, the vast majority of the literature produced on the subject consists of curricular units for teaching about African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos/Chicanos, or various Asian-American groups. As dialogue on cultural difference and education has spread to other nations, it has become more sharply focused on complex issues of identity, diversity, and citizenship.

Advocates of multicultural education define it as having either two or three key features. James Banks, a leading voice in the field, defines three central concerns addressed by multicultural education: validating the identities of socially oppressed groups; teaching the history of exploitation and resistance to it; and providing empowering education to oppressed groups.2 Others reduce these features to two: "the 'recognition of diversity' strand [and] the 'social equality' strand."3 Scholars of multicultural education agree that it is a social movement for educational reform that initially grew out of civil rights movements in the United States, particularly efforts for the complete enfranchisement of African-Americans.4 [End Page 97]

The concerns of "multicultural education"—equality of educational access on the one hand and institutionalized recognition of historical inequalities on the other—are a global phenomenon of the twenty-first century. The way that they play out in each nation, however, is both historically specific and trans-nationally formed. This paper discusses ways in which concerns about multicultural education have spread around the world in the past ten to twenty years and how the meaning of the term and the questions surrounding it have changed as diversity itself has become an educational issue in diverse national contexts. Loosened from its mooring in the United States' civil rights movement, multicultural education has become a rubric—or foil—for a certain arena of educational reform discourse around the world.

Whatever its specific connotations, and there are many, the term "multicultural education" speaks to questions of how school children are taught about their own social identity and the identity of others. As I argue in part one, the logic of mass schooling in nation-states already contains contradictions that sooner or later will raise questions about multiculturalism in any educational system. However, the "epochal" dimensions of globalization, such as wide-scale human migration and intensification of global communication, have complicated social identities within many nations and therefore stimulated public debate on how pluralism is recognized in the curriculum and pedagogy of national school systems. The cultural and economic trends, which have been concomitant with globalization, fuel national debates on multiculturalism in contradictory fashions. In part two I illustrate how, in the case of language in educational policy, globalization stimulates both greater acceptance of bilingual education and, in many communities, less acceptance of it. The paper concludes with an argument that the issues associated with multicultural education increasingly become an aspect of global educational debate; they converge around a common perspective of intercultural education.

I. Citizenship, Difference, and Mass Education

The institutionalization of mass, state-sponsored, formal education around the world carries in itself the seeds from which debate over multicultural education grows within different nations. As long noted by world systems theorists [End Page 98] such as Arnove5 and Ramirez,6 mass schooling carries with it a universal cultural blueprint. That blueprint includes the value of meritocracy and thus, by implication, the value of equity in education. Yet, as has long been clear in most nations, educational opportunity is differentially available to socially different groups. While the appearance of scholarly work that explicitly connects multiculturalism with educational systems around the world is relatively new, interest in educational equity is an enduring theme of comparative education. Since its inception over 100 years ago, questions about equal access to education within nations and relative equality of access across nations have been central concerns for the field of comparative education.7

Social pluralism is a reality in most...

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